


The Audacity of Growing Up

by koalaxninja



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Date Rape Drug/Roofies, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, margo backstory, very brief and not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 07:23:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18310913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koalaxninja/pseuds/koalaxninja
Summary: Margo grows up. Along the way, she builds all that hard, glossy armor.





	The Audacity of Growing Up

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: I wasn't entirely sure what to tag this with, so there's one scene when Margo is 11 and an adult male touches her hair and her leg, but it doesn't escalate beyond that. There's also one instance of averted date rape. Every thing else is canon typical. 
> 
> I have been thinking nonstop about Margo since I watched 4x10. That episode meant so much to me, as I know it did to a lot of my fellow angry women. This show has been such a gift in giving us so many multifaceted and complex women, and _letting them live in that complexity_. Summer did such an amazing job with this episode too, I'm in awe. I just knew I had to write about Margo, and I probably will again, because parts of this got seriously autobiographical, and I haven't had my screaming in the desert catharsis moment yet, so I'm still figuring out how to be vulnerable. 
> 
> I know she gave up her throne, but she will always be High King Margo of my heart.
> 
> Thank you for reading, this fandom really has been such a gift.

Margo is four, and her daddy sings to her every night. 

She is his little princess, and he is her king. He sings to her, tells her stories of magic and adventure, gives her anything she wants. He is the best dad, and she the best daughter. Margo doesn’t know what forever means, but she knows she could bask in the glow of her father’s love until the universe burns away. 

She doesn’t know what happens when the flames spread and consume, but she likes the heat. If warmth is a lullaby, then Margo wants to grow up to be a wildfire. 

—

Margo is nine the first time someone calls her a bitch. 

It’s Randy Johnson, and he doesn’t know what the word means, not really, but it’s something they’ve heard adults say, and it sounds mean, so that’s what he calls her when Margo beats him in a tennis game during gym. His dumb friends laugh and call her a bitch too, and Margo feels a burning in her chest, but she doesn’t know how to wield words like weapons yet, so she cries, but the tears don’t quench the fire. 

The next day, they’re running races, so Margo makes sure to stand near Randy and trips him while they’re running from one end of the gym to the other. She wins her race, and Randy breaks his nose. He calls her a bitch again, but it’s garbled through the blood running down his face, and this time, Margo feels like being a bitch means she’s won. 

—

Margo is eleven when someone calls her pretty and it scares her. 

Her dad is hosting a business dinner, and Margo is the precocious hostess, darling in her new dress and making hors d’oeurve recommendations to the guests. Margo’s dad is delighted, bragging about how smart and talented his daughter is, and Margo basks in the praise. 

It’s later, after dinner when most everyone has gone home, but one of her dad’s business partners lingers, smoking cigars in the study with her dad. Margo was allowed to stay up with the men, and she is pleased that her dad thinks she’s mature enough to sit with them while they talk, even if she doesn’t necessarily understand the conversation. 

Her dad leaves to find more whiskey in the kitchen, and that’s when the other man comes over and sits next to Margo on the couch. He slides one arm around her shoulders, puts his other hand on her thigh. He smells like smoke and alcohol, and his eyes are bloodshot. Margo holds still and tries to remember how to hold up a smile, the polite one her dad taught her when he told her that sometimes you have to smile even when you’re not happy, to make other people happy. 

“You’re such a pretty little girl,” the man says, leaning in close to whisper in her ear. He noses at her hair and rubs his hand up and down her leg. Her skirt starts to ride up and Margo grips the hem in her fists.

That’s as far as he gets though, because they hear her dad singing as he returns from the kitchen, and the man gets up and settles back down in his chair across from Margo like nothing ever happened. 

Margo excuses herself after that, and her dad sends her off to bed with a kiss to her forehead. Margo doesn’t run out of the study, but she rips her dress off as soon as her bedroom door closes behind her and wraps herself in her pajamas and every blanket she can find. She shakes in the bed until she hears the front door close and a car leave down the driveway. 

She throws the dress away, and tells her dad that she outgrew it.

—

Margo is twelve and gets sent to the principal’s office for slapping a boy in her art class. 

He tried to lift up her skirt when the teacher’s back was turned, so Margo slapped him hard enough to bruise. She’s surprised but pleased at the strength and fury she still feels bubbling at her fingertips, but the teacher sees the slap and not the assault, so Margo takes the punishment. A day’s suspension and a mark on her permanent record. 

Her father comes to pick her up from school himself, and the look he gives her is pure disappointment. 

“What happened to my sweet princess?” he asks and Margo wonders if he’s ever felt an inner rage like the one that burns in her.

—

Margo is thirteen when she realizes being called princess makes her feel small. Like everything about her can be reduced down to a single concept, one that’s obedient and dependent and scared. Like it didn’t matter who she was, what she wanted. Being smart, or pretty, or strong was secondary to being controlled.

“You can be anything, Margo,” her father tells her, like he’s told her a hundred times before. “But you’ll always be my little princess.”

He still calls her princess, but now it feels like a curse. Instead of lullabies and stories, her dad speaks to her in condescending comments and sets rules that Margo ignores. He isn’t home enough to realize how often she breaks them anyway. 

He hates her clothes, her friends, the classes she takes at school. When he bothers to come home, his only thought for his beloved daughter is all the ways she’s disappointing him. Like he never considered he could be disappointing _her_.

Margo looks at her father, and where she once saw the universe, now she sees a man. 

—

Margo is sixteen when she sleeps with Eliza Lytle’s boyfriend. 

She’s throwing a party at her house, and everyone is too drunk for high schoolers on a Tuesday, but that doesn’t stop Sean Haywood from slipping something into his girlfriend’s drink. Eliza doesn’t notice, but Margo does. If he wants sex so badly, he doesn’t need to rape a girl to do it, so Margo goes over to them, spills the drugged drink all over Eliza’s dress, and sends her to one bathroom to clean up, and takes Sean to the other. Sean’s attractive and can kiss well enough to make up for coming all over her skirt. He doesn’t notice her kicking the rest of his baggie of drugs behind the toilet before he pulls his pants up from around his ankles. 

Eliza confronts her at school the next day. Apparently Sean’s shitty behavior draws the line at lying to his girlfriend because Eliza is crying while she screams at Margo in between second and third period, calling her a slut and a whore, until the school counselor is called to lead her away to sob out the rest of her teenage heartache in the nurse’s office. Margo laughs in her face, doesn’t bother to justify her actions with Sean’s, and moves on with her day. Eliza intended to use the word slut like a knife and cut Margo open, but Margo turns the sharp edges outward and builds her defenses on ‘bitch’ and ‘slut’ and dares any of her classmates to try climbing those battlements. 

Later that night, locked alone in her room, she takes one of the pills herself. Feels how the drugs make her loose, make her woozy, makes the room spin. She learns the symptoms to recognize the cause, just in case. She learns how to keep her balance steady, no matter how drunk she is, so she can wear shoes with heels sharp enough to stab a man. She flushes the rest of the pills down the toilet.

— 

Margo is seventeen when Ray Latanza comes over in his Porsche. 

Margo always liked fast cars, and Ray has been hitting on her for months. So she throws him a bone as Whitesnake comes on the radio, and trades a hand job for a ride. 

Ray comes all over her hand just as her dad walks out of the house. They stare at each other, and Margo can see on his face the disgust, the distaste. He looks at her and doesn’t recognize her, and Margo hates how it feels, hates the thread of shame curling in her stomach, threatening to swallow her whole. She hates the control her dad still has over her feelings, and she pushes aside the shame to let the rage boil up and over. 

Margo doesn’t break eye contact as she licks her hand clean, then turns to Ray, who still has his pants open and looks like the panic is just starting to register through his orgasm. 

“Drive,” she says. “Now.” 

Ray peels out of the driveway, and Margo doesn’t look back. 

—

Margo is eighteen and skips her senior prom to rob a bank. 

Margo had gotten pretty good at petty larceny over the last year, which is how Archie finds her. Instead of turning her in, he asks for her help. He has a team of what he calls specialists, and they need one more person for the bank heist he’s planning. Margo is bored of school and her life, and nothing she does is worth her father’s attention anymore, so she agrees. 

She only meets one other person on Archie’s team, a blonde girl younger than her named Parker. Parker’s odd, but Margo likes her, likes the way that Parker doesn’t conform to the world, doesn’t let it tell her anything about who she should be. She lets Archie boss her around, though, and looks confused when Margo asks her why. 

“He’s my dad,” she replies. “He’s the best thief in the world.” 

“Okay, first of all, hot stuff, you’re way better,” Margo replies. She’s seen how Parker contorts herself through the air vents in the bank, how being a thief comes as natural to her as breathing. “And second, just because he raised you doesn’t mean you owe him shit.” 

Parker just stares at her, and then Archie comes over to give Margo her cut, and that would be the end of it, except Archie also hands her a card with an address and a six-pointed star with a keyhole on it. 

“If you ever want to expand your abilities,” he says, “give me a call.” 

Margo pockets the cash and tosses the card. She’s not interested in being a full-time thief, and she knows who she is without anyone’s help. 

—

Margo is nineteen when the boy who’s in love with her calls her a frigid bitch. 

They’re not dating, but he acts like he has the right to sit in the passenger seat of her car, wasted off his ass and screaming at her to love him. 

He calls her emotionally stunted, that she wears her daddy issues like a neon sign, and that he’s the only one who will ever love her. He calls her a cold, frigid bitch who doesn’t get what a catch he is, how he’s a nice guy and that he deserves her love. He can give her everything, if only she would feel something. 

Margo lets him rant, but then he’s pushing her against the car door and leaning in, ready to take what Margo never consented to give. She shoves him back and pulls out the knife tucked in her bra and holds it to his throat. He shuts up so fast, it’s like hitting the mute button on misogyny.

“Listen here, you dollar menu cock,” Margo snarls. “I don’t need anybody, least of all a scared little boy who can’t crawl his way out of a bottle. Now get the fuck out of my car.” 

He scrambles away and Margo never sees him again. She takes frigid and adds it to her arsenal.

— 

Margo is twenty-two and the Brakebills campus sprawls before her. 

Finding out she’s a magician feels like waking up for the first time. Of course she’s not a fucking docile princess — she’s a magician. Here, she can be smart and strong, and no one will ask how dare she, because they all dare. There’s power here, and it’s familiar. It’s the power Margo felt under her skin every time someone tried to control her, every time a man called her baby or sweetheart, every time she stopped playing their game and they called her bitch instead. It’s power she can now call to her fingertips and shape the world as she chooses. 

If magic felt like waking up, then finding Eliot feels like finding her soulmate. Together, they are glamorous, amazing mega-bitches, and no one can touch them. And Eliot’s like her in all the ways that matter, miserable from living in a world that didn’t want them, but so wholly themselves, they couldn’t possibly be anyone else. Now they are each other’s world, and fuck the rest. With Eliot at her side, she is untouchable. 

— 

Margo is twenty-three, then twenty-four, then fuck if she knows because she never bothered to do the math on the time differential between Fillory and Earth.

There’s Quentin, painfully sincere in his every movement, and Alice, who has a rage boiling under her schoolgirl clothes that calls out to Margo’s own. There’s Kady, who fights with her fists where Margo learned to use her words, but the rage is the same. Julia, who is smarter than all of them, and the world cuts her down for it, but she comes back up swinging every time. There’s Penny and Josh and Fen, and Margo doesn’t know how to care for all these people in her life, but she figures if she can help keep them all alive, that’s close enough. 

But Alice does die. So does Penny. Quentin nearly dies, several times. Julia is raped, Kady overdoses. And then one day, she wakes up from a months-long fever dream, memories of Janet crowding in with her real memories, and Eliot is gone. His body is still here, his eyes look into hers, but he is gone, replaced with an all-powerful Monster that even with all of her rage, Margo is powerless against. If there was one person in all of creation she should have protected, it’s Eliot, and she failed.

So she throws herself into being a High King, leeches out the anger and the sorrow in negotiations and council meetings. Shoves away the pain, reforges it as something useful, makes herself the leader that Fillory needs. If Fillory crumbles, then so will Margo, so she needs her kingdom to be strong. She will do whatever it takes to save Fillory, because when it counted, she couldn’t save Eliot. 

Then a glimmer of hope comes, a bunny proclaiming Eliot’s alive and rumors of weapons that expel possession. But it comes at a cost — her crown, her kingdom, everything she’s fought for, every thing that she as a woman struggled to prove was hers by right that was simply handed to Eliot, no questions asked. 

In the end, it’s not even a contest. She lets her palace guards throw her out, lets Fen assume her crown, lets the Fillorians and Lorians think they’ve beaten her. Because her whole life has been training her for one thing: when there’s a job for a tough bitch, Margo’s the bitch to call. 

She may be stripped of her crown, her royal clothes and jewels, but Margo is hard, glossy armor personified, and she carries all of who she is with her into the desert. 

—

Margo is exhausted and beaten, and Lizard Eliot is asking her, “Are you stronger than a mountain?” 

No, she’s not stronger than a mountain. She can be broken. All this rage and fear and grief she carries inside of her is heavy, and she is crumbling under the weight of it. She rages at the hallucination of her best friend, cries and screams into the night, releases every bit of pent up pain and sorrow that lodged itself in her chest. Let the demons come, let them take her. She is nothing to this desert, and it will consume her and forget her. 

The demon comes, but she does not destroy her. She heard Margo’s heartbreak and came to help. She and her sisters always come to help, but the tribe leaders imprison them instead to keep their women docile. The demon fills Margo’s bag with black sand, and Margo takes the sand and her rage back to the camp, takes the truth of what she learned out in the desert and her rage and combines them into the strongest weapon she’s ever forged. 

All of her anger, her rage, every betrayal, every time someone called her a bitch or a slut, every time someone made her choose between pieces of herself without letting her be whole, all of that flows through her as she wields the ice axes, and she now knows who she truly is. 

She is not the mountain but the storm. Not the strength but the fury. She is girl and princess and woman and queen and king and magician. She is the destroyer. 

That Monster better watch the fuck out, because here she comes. 

**Author's Note:**

> Parker and Archie are lovingly borrowed from my other favorite TV show of all time, Leverage, because it delighted me to combine them with the Magicians. All the other characters are completely made up.


End file.
